


Glory, glory

by discolobotomy



Category: Far Cry 5, Inside Eden's Gate
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, F/F, F/M, Multi, Non-Consensual Drug Use, Non-Consensual Spanking, Rape/Non-con Elements, like 0 to 60 in several weeks, so this will be the slowest of burns
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-05-09
Updated: 2018-06-12
Packaged: 2019-05-04 13:55:40
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 7
Words: 8,830
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14594478
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/discolobotomy/pseuds/discolobotomy
Summary: It doesn’t take long for Sara to wish she’d asked a few more questions before imbibing.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I got too invested in the characters from Inside Eden's Gate

“You are so special. It _shines_ right off you.”

What a line, she thinks. But she can’t do a thing about the tipping she feels inside, like an overfull glass of water flicked by a finger nail. Was she always like this? So susceptible? Such a sucker for kindness?

Silently picking at her skin in the backseat as Alex and Hannah compare plans, like she can give the loneliness away one particle at a time.

Their last hurrah. Somehow he could hear it ringing through the chambers of her heart. She tried so hard to keep that fucker muffled.

She radiated abandonment against her will - Hannah had told her so in measured tones and Alex looked away, complicit. They both had her own pain, just as old and potent as Sara’s, but they also had a few coping mechanisms at hand; good or bad was not in her jurisdiction, she only had it in her to be grateful to be near them. And afraid.

The very thing she should be now.

Especially given how hospitable they were being at the moment.

She could still feel Faith’s fingers tucking her hair behind her ears like she thought Sara’s face was worth looking at.

And they are both really looking at her. Her flushed face, wet eyes, ratty shirt. She is very aware of the shortness of her shorts. They'd planned to hit any semblance of a clothing store after they'd met Mark and capitalize on the 0% sales tax but then, oh you know.

“You looking for a husband in those?” Alex had said.

“Someone swiped my clothes at the lavanderia.” She’d grumbled. “And what if it’s not a husband I’m looking for?”

She remembers Hannah smiling, but that could have been a trick of the light.

Faith is smiling beyond a shadow of a doubt– and _something_ is happening at the corners of the preacher’s mouth that doesn’t telegraph quite as much storm and stress as the man she’d seen at the revival, or the lake, or even the long ride over, Hannah lax and silent at her side, her wet jacket soaking into Sara’s dry sleeve as he pontificated poetic and overall scared her shitless.

Bunkers. Bunkers were probably warm, at the very least. She might not mind it, she thought with a degree of self-loathing.

360 degrees.

“Sara. I swear to God I that will never abandon you.”

Oh look, she’s crying again, straight into the doctored cup over which they stare at her intently, like she might do something that would make her matter.

“Ever.”

She’s tasted worse.

Joseph reaches for her, cupping her cheek in his hand, she turns into it, presses her face into the creases of his palm like she can leave every saturated salt crystal inside her there. Faith makes cooing noises somewhere far away.

“Sara,” Alex’s voice says, “you have the absolute worst taste.”

Whose bad taste is it if you weren’t the one who put it in your mouth in the first place?

She wishes she’d said at the time, whether or not it made sense.

It doesn’t feel like the other times, the long knotted string of foster fathers who told her a lock on her door would put her in danger, like she wasn’t already in it, the hallway floorboards giving way in succession as their heavy bodies crept towards her room, her cot, her corner.

He knew that corner too. They were there together.

“Instant Stockholm” said Hannah’s voice, “just add water”. But Hannah kept a knife under her pillow. Sara always wondered where she’d picked that up, from advice or experience. She wished she’d asked, on the off chance the information would take her back in time before she became whoever Sara was.

Or maybe she no longer needed to. They didn’t seem to mind her.

“You’re home, Sara.” he says.

She wants more than anything for that to be true.

 

Later, Sara wakes up to everyone breaking their promises.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I can't stop yikes!

They’ve put her in an under-loved cabin that opened out onto a very long, very frightening suspension bridge.

“For the roaches.” Faith says to the box of borax powder Sara’s just picked up.

“For your friends.” Faith says to the empty bunkbeds with the stripped, beaten up pads too small to be called mattresses.

Sara looks at her wide-eyed. This had been _her_ out, not theirs. Hannah would be reporting to Pendleton and Alex had a long list of reservations and museum passes he had bought in advance.

She couldn't imagine they'd want to be anywhere near her if they were at all waylaid.

{It hadn’t been very long ago at all that they’d shared a room (in a Spanish Fork, Utah motel a bit off the 15) - well, a queen-sized mattress if you had an eye for technicalities - and it ached to remember what felt like the hundreds of times before. As usual the front desk staff looked askance and Hannah surly, but Alex was their unofficial treasurer and director of discretionary spending and he’d reserved what he’d reserved.

Sara somehow always ended up sandwiched between them.

They complained about her frequent bathroom visits but never once took her up on her offer/demand/plea to trade places; Alex needed to be near his phone on the bedside table and Hannah needed to be closest to the door in the event of necessary ass-kicking and likely murder.

Sara wouldn’t admit to needing anything when it had always been them, together.

Hannah was a deep sleeper, ran hot, always one foot sticking out from under the sheets. Unless the room’s insulation was bad at which point it ended up pressed between Sara’s calves.

Alex would wake up during what he called Sara’s “wee hours” and play solitaire on his phone until she came back to bed.

“The blue light will mess with your sleep,” she whispers, clambering over him and under the duvet he’s holding aloft, wriggling into place between him and Hannah.

“So will everything else this trip,” he sighs, letting the covers fall onto them.

His eyes were hardly visible in the low light but there was enough for her to see the furrow between his brows.

Hmm.

“Why this trip in particular?”

“It’s more...after this trip.”

Don’t start, she thought, pressing against Hannah for unconscious support.

“You bought your plane tickets in November, what’s left to keep you up?”

He was silent for a moment, like he had been anticipating a different question.

“I mean, yeah. I’ve got it all diagrammed and shit but you can’t plan for everything,” she can’t look at that furrow anymore, “or everyone.”

Oh he wanted to talk about it now, did he? Well that didn’t suit Sara at all, she already had trouble sleeping, much more so on a pillow she’d been crying on.

“You shouldn’t be expected to.” She bit out, trying to end it there.

“I don’t do it because I’m expec-“

“Can you imagine what you could do for yourself if you weren’t micromanaging everyone else?”

A surprised pause, then a forceful exhale through the nose.

“I don’t-“

“Don’t lie.”

A sullen silence.

“It’ll probably make you a great dad though.” She says conciliatorily to the ceiling.

A decidedly less sullen silence, he hasn’t ever said it outright but she’s seen how he looks at happy families. Like his heart is breaking and reforming in an endless loop.

“Thanks.”

“Don’t thank me, i had nothing to do with it.”

“I got to practice on you-“

“Don’t you-“

“Who taught you to drive.”

“Hannah.”

Hannah gives a snort of subconscious recognition.

“Hold up, I recall I-“

“-helped me with the written test, and let Hannah take over when it came time to parallel park.”

That furrow is really deep.

“3 point turns were all me, i know that for a fact.”

“Thrilling stuff.”

He huffs and throws an arm around her to nudge Hannah’s shoulder.

“Hannah.”

“Whrrh?”

“Get on your side, you’re snoring.”

“Am not,” Hannah grumbles, but she obliges them, rolling over so they can spoon up behind her.

Sara can't sleep for a long time after that.

This time they’d all been awake and it hadn’t protected them.}

“When?” Sara asks, a constricted plea in her throat. She knew her friends, and she knew she’d come the quietest of all.

She senses Faith’s aborted sigh. Like she knows this could become a daily question.

“When they’ve proven themselves to John, Jacob-“

Jingleheimerschmidt, Sara couldn’t help but supply internally

“-and to Father.”

His name is my name too

Sara looks at the floor, down at Faith’s feet. She’d call them elegant if she were so inclined, despite the obvious callouses and the violet bruise beneath the nail of her left big toe.

Through the fog of high octane panic that propelled Sara across that bridge she remembered Faith: singing, talking about things like hydroelectricity and the nitrate levels of the soil, taking her hand, admonishing her to look at the view.

Whenever I go out

What will life be now, she thought.

The people always shout

Faith’s fingers find Sara’s chin, tilting her head up. Sara wonders if (hopes) this will be a leitmotif in their encounters.

“Would you like to pray for them?”

Sara doesn’t quite know what that looks like, but it seems to be what Faith wants and if Sara’s good at anything it’s taking on others’ desires as her own. And cooking, in several of her homes she’d cooked in exchange for shelter; and she’s caught wind of their mac n cheese.

Looking to Faith for approbation, she puts her hands together palm to palm, fingers pointed up.

Faith smiles and wraps both arms around her waist, wedging Sara’s steepled hands between her breasts and pressing her forehead to Sara’s hairline. It’s all Sara can do to not evaporate on the spot.

“Our Father, who blesses us with his presence, his wisdom, his guidance, we pray that those blessings be felt by those who resist our help, that their hearts will open to the ferocity of your love and find their purpose in our garden. We pray the believers be not encumbered by those who reject the word, that John will cleanse them of wickedness and Jacob will secure their fealty. Not all can come by their faith so easily, it is gained sometimes through strife and submission, but the worthy will not fail. The rest will go with the Collapse. Amen.”

Sara hasn’t heard many prayers in her life but they haven’t typically filled her with that particular brand of foreboding.

She remembers the rules and stutters out an “amen”. Faith squeezes her tighter, it feels like a reward.

“I’ll bring you some sheets,” she says, “there’s something for you on the table.”

She’s crying, and reading it for probably the 273rd time when Faith returns and rushes her.

“What’s wrong?”

“I don’t know.” Sara says, knowing perfectly well. It’s addressed to her and it’s not shy about words like dearest, friendship, family, love.

That’s new.

Faith takes it from Sara’s hand and reads it over, looks at her fondly and brushes her thumb over her wet cheek. “Help me make the bed,” she says, “We’ll get you comfortable and if you sleep well, we’ll walk the Path tomorrow.”

Sara’s not sure about that, she can hear the bridge creaking in the wind and she has yet to see any signs of indoor plumbing, but Faith is securing one corner of the fitted sheet and looks to Sara to do the other.

Later, Sara wonders if she’s brushing her teeth correctly - Faith is looking at her so intently, and later than that, when Faith slips under the sheets with her, Sara wonders if this is something she does for everybody.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> oh no it's me again

They walked the path the next day, and it took the whole.  
Damn.  
Day.

They encountered bears, pilgrims bloodied by bears, corpses mauled by bears, poop containing fragments of clothing clearly passed by bears - all things having to do with bears they found.

And when they finally arrived back at the statue where they began all Sara could muster up in response was “Hm”.

Faith spent the night again, clearly concerned with her dearth of shock and awe.

Sara could tell herself it served both of them when Faith raised the bar the following day and took her to Peter.

His face was quite honestly like a pot of marinara that had boiled over but he was kind and gentle with everyone they came across and so compellingly intelligent that Sara could not look away for long.

The operation was staffed by the unanimously scarred. Luke never drank again. Matthew stopped heroin. Even Faith’s three-quarter length sleeves couldn’t hide the tampered veins they shared in common. She kissed their hands and faces and Sara tried not to be jealous.

She was beginning to be acquainted with the group psychology. They were safe, for the moment, but work was to be done, no digressions and no distractions.

No makeup, which Sara didn’t mind too much, besides wishing for a dab of concealer for the milk pimple on her chin. The Project had herds of dairy cows that did not go unused. (That was assignment one and it skeeved her out, she was better making yogurt after that part had been completed by someone else.)

No phones - slightly more difficult to process. Faith assured her that once Alex and Hannah passed muster that she’d see them too often to need her phone.

And who else needed to hear from her, really.

No obscene music - this one chafed, her second assignment had been picking datura flowers in complete silence, the warbling wheeze of her compressed diaphragm trying to sing something to work to as she bent double, mosquitoes feeding on the back of her sunbaked neck.

Inoxia

Faith would come by, someone with her strapping enough to pull the wheeled water barrel, and dispense cupfuls. A droplet escaped Sara’s mouth and rolled down to her larynx before Faith interrupted its path with her thumb, and slid the wetness all the way up to the corner of her lips.

Brugmansia

Sara and the water-bearer made flushed eye contact, Faith squeezed her chin affectionately (like it belonged to her) before continuing down the row.

Stramonium

Each sibling appeared to operate an arm of the department of outreach, as it were; in a fashion Alex’s voice called authoritarian and Hannah condemned with her potent silence - but Faith would hold her hand and she couldn’t help but think her the gentlest tyrant of them all.

She spent the night again, pressed up against Sara’s back, chin tucked over her shoulder, arms wrapped around her like a self-assured life vest and Sara woke up to her weaving flowers into her hair and she begged _whoever_ was listening to not let her get used to this.

She was beginning to think the most she’d see of Joseph was his statue when Faith woke her on Sunday before dawn broke.

And when they entered the church, followed by Faith’s assembly, his smile fell on her like a shaft of sunlight.

He beckoned them to the platform and Faith pulled her up the steps and into place. The hall began to fill in. Many willingly, but enough not so.

The glint off John’s sunglasses pulled her eyes, but the smirk on his face led them to Alex at his side - looking drawn, facial hair growing in.

Jacob’s red drew her gaze, Hannah close by, looking leaner than Sara’s ever seen her, far leaner than Sara ever wanted to see her. She’d heard Jacob and John discussed in the fields in hushed tones. It was rarely, if ever, complimentary. She wanted to run to them, but she also hoped they wouldn’t recognize her, clean and bright and ashamed.

“Hebrews, 11:7.” Joseph began, and the quiet room quieted further.

“Noah, warned by God about things not _yet_ seen,” his eyes traveled to Sara, the pleased quirk of his lips giving her whiplash, making her feel warmer than she had any right to feel, “in reverence prepared an ark for the salvation of his household, by which he condemned the world, and became an heir of the righteousness which is according to faith.”

The namesake took her hand. Sara hoped hers wasn’t damp, but both Hannah’s and Alex’s eyes were boring into hers and her thigh creases always sweated when she was looked at like she’d erred gravely.

“When he was called, Abraham obeyed by going out to a place he was to receive for an inheritance; and he. Went. Out.” he let the emphasis rest, “not knowing where he was going.” Those in the front row had either eyes closed or filled with tears.

Sara was growing accustomed to the herbaceous sting of Bliss in her mouth but it didn’t make her friends’ gazes any lighter a load.

“By faith he lived as an alien in the land of promise, for he was looking for the city which has foundations, whose architect and builder is God.”

His eyes are on Sara again.

“If we have been sent crumbling before, those foundations can be difficult to believe,” he said softly, “But as it says in the verses preceding: ‘We are not of those who shrink back and are destroyed, but of those who have faith and preserve their souls.’”

His eyes back on the crowd, Sara bereft. “To have faith is not the choice of a moment, but of a lifetime.”

“What choice have you given us?” shouts someone in assembly; however they are unarmed and swiftly silenced.

“Noah built an ark in the _desert_.” Joseph smiles ruefully, “Can you imagine the distrust? The ridicule? The clamor of the idolatrous?”

To the crumpled heap of humanity hefted up before him: “Many shepherds have destroyed my vineyard.”

Holes. They have left holes in her with their eyes. No amount of Bliss can fill her up.

“They have made it a desolation; it mourns to me.” He shook his head. “But no one lays it to heart.”

The wavelength of his voice shrinks to a murmur in her head as the body is dragged away.

“The sword of the Lord devours from one end of the land to the other; no one shall be safe.”

Blood has scorched a path onto the floor.

“Those destined for pestilence, to pestilence, and those destined for the sword, to the sword; those destined for famine, to famine, and those destined for captivity, to captivity.”

Faith is squeezing her hand so tightly.


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> finally a whiff of smut!

It was Faith’s suggestion. A prayer group. An opportunity to evangelize.

Sara agreed enthusiastically with Faith and Faith asked Joseph and Joseph called them forth, John’s hand on Alex’s neck and Jacob crowding against Hannah’s back. She didn’t know who to go to first, she couldn’t decide who would hate her least.

But Faith spoke for her, and Jacob for Hannah, and John for Alex and it was all settled. Jacob was determined to host them at the Grand View the next day.

As the assembly began to disperse John’s hand closed around Sara’s bicep and wrenched her in close.  
“Oh, rib.” was the nickname he’d bequeathed her. Her face got hot every time he used it but she couldn’t well refute it when Genesis was the very first reading Faith had assigned “I have a few doubts to entertain.”

“John,” Faith nearly growled, taking Sara’s other arm, “it’s not to you that we address our conduct-“

“Who on earth will look at that mouth and take a vow of chastity?” His salacious grin scorched a line up through her. Alex’s expression was stormy and Jacob had already herded Hannah and his cadre out the door.

 

The first couple were painful, Faith came along to prompt and supervise and she and Sara were met with faces as stony as…stone things.

Sara eventually pleaded with her for privacy, that these two strangers would be strange no more if she could only make her case alone, maybe accompanied by food, Faith had given her limited access to one of the kitchens and the contours of their clavicles alarmed her. Faith relented, but still insisted upon someone to act as an escort to and fro and a sentry in the interim. Who was currently serving his duty outside the door of Hannah’s room. She’d negotiated it in exchange for a ham and cheese sandwich.

“So. Phillipians-“

“They’re clearly grooming you.” Hannah says.

“Could we at least make the effort-“

“This is M.O. numero uno for cults, winnow out the most vulnerable, isolate them from their support system-“

“Fuck right off with that-“

“Sara, where do they keep you?! We’ve been trying to track you down-“

“If we could just-“

“We haven’t been alone with you since they -what?- selected you? And you want to do psalms? Fuck that. It’s time to talk about getting out of here.”

She’s crying already before he’s even finished speaking. So much for her powers of persuasion.

And suddenly Hannah is holding her. She hears Alex sigh before he joins them.

“Sara, this was all in the packet.” he says quietly into her hair.

She refrained from putting her head in her hands. His writing was so dry.

 

Prayer group met twice weekly - once in Holland and once in the Whitetails - which wasn’t often enough to give them the amount of calories or receive the amount of company she wanted but she clung to it.

They committed to at least one section of scripture per session, (both Faith and John had a habit of initiating quizzes) but otherwise they ate, commiserated, and talked escape. Well, Alex and Hannah did, Sara spooned up more beef stroganoff onto each of their plates and listened. Their days consisted of so much suffering and hers was a nuclear age Georgette Heyerdahl pastoral featuring her dodecahedron of crushes.

Present company included, as always.

Anyhow, it wasn’t worth bringing up when she knew she was already getting more than she deserved.

“The Cougars have transportation, if we could agree on a route-“

“We’d have to be armed.”

“Do you-“

“No.”

Sara looked up from the casserole dish. No matter how many lipids and carbohydrates she packed into Hannah she was looking worse every visit.

“We’ll keep scratching. Sara, what could you get us in the way of rations?”

She had forgotten that she was expected to participate.

“It would have to be a little at a time,” off their looks, “how do I explain the sudden disappearance of enough food to feed twenty and change?”

“Well you wouldn’t be around to explain it.”

Sara can’t look at them. She can’t decide which of her lives to lose.

“Sara, we’re not leaving you here.”

“You left before.”

“To find help! And it’s coming!”

“The Collapse is coming too and I’d rather us all be somewhere where we’re not at risk of becoming Hiroshima shadows!”

“There’s gotta be some kind of Godwin’s law for referencing Hiroshima.”

“D’you actually believe these monsters?”

“Call it an extension of Pascal’s wager-“

“This is the brand of God you want to buy into, Sara? The kind that would imprison and torture your friends?”

“No! No, i didn’t know until I saw you-“

“Because why? Because you’d been shielded from all that? Why do you think that is?”

“I don’t know-“

“Deep down, you do know-“

“Alex, that’s enough-“

“I’m not leaving this alone, you think just because they haven’t hurt you yet that they won’t?”

“Worried someone else can hurt me worse than you can?”

“Sara-“

“We get out and you go to the Marines and you go abroad for who knows how long-“

“My flight should’ve been last Thursday, actually-”

“Where do I go?”

Hannah takes Sara’s hand in hers.

“Is this as good as you’ll let yourself believe you deserve?”

No answer was forthcoming. And the sound of the guard unlocking the door signaled their session’s end.

 

She attempted to malinger her way out of the following appointment.

“But prayer would be the best thing for you!” Faith said, “and John has been telling me that Alex’s attitude has much improved.”

Sara doubted both of those clauses very much and it worried her that Faith had nothing to say about Hannah, so she made moussaka and went.

When she arrived at their usual spot in Holland, she found the lock kicked in, the guard out cold and a note inside.

‘Meet us at the Spread Eagle’, it said.

It had been so long since she’d had a drink.

They were already tipsy when they greeted her, she didn’t imagine that was hard to accomplish with the in-house Temperance movement at large.

They got grabby when they were drunk, bringing her in tight and going in for cheek kisses that landed on her neck and stayed there. The bartender, a lovely but hardened looking blond, handed her a cold glass, the surface tension keeping the foam intact, and drew them away from the door with her eyes. Arm in arm, they marched her to a back room.

“So,” Alex says “there’s a tunnel adjacent to the Lamb of God church over in Fall’s End, I know someone who can cover us from A to B.”

Hannah looks more vibrant than Sara’s seen her since before they were selected. Acquired. Captured.

“We meet there under the same onus we meet here.”

“When?”

“Dunno, but _soon_.”

They had the outline of a plan, and that was good enough for now. They broke into the moussaka.

They’d worked up a nice buzz, sprawled about like partying Roman senators when Alex’s hand drifted across Sara’s bottom and Hannah brought hers down hard on top of it.

“Ow.” Alex and Sara said.

“Sorry.” Hannah and Alex said, Hannah laughing, Alex almost contrite.

“S’okay.” Sara said quietly.

A beat, a group effort towards comprehension.

“What is?” Alex and Hannah said.

They didn’t ask for this often, they knew better than anybody where her pain lived. But she’d woken up to either or both of them rubbing one out on either side of her many a time over the course of their adventures together and it was easier sometimes to offer assistance than pretend to be asleep. Unless, of course, she had a grievance, in which case she turned her back and let the devil take the hindmost. But she wouldn’t  
turn her back on either of them now.

The blood rushes to her face, speaking for her. Alex and Hannah look at one another, smiling minutely, reality testing, then back at Sara.

“Is it?” They say.

Before her chin can even tip all the way down in assent they’re on her, unwrapping her, pressing her into the makeshift nest.

They knew better than to try for penetration any more extreme than a couple fingers, but they each got one in her as soon as ever they could, not quite synchronized but definitely on the same team. Somewhere nearby her beer had spilled and it was soaking into her rucked-up shirt. Hannah managed to unclasp Sara’s bra with her free hand and grab a handful for herself and Alex had rotated 180 so that he could get his cock into her grip and still play with her clit. They alternated kissing her mouth and kissing each other and kissing her other places and she didn’t have the heart to tell them not to leave marks. They were together, and God damn them if He wanted.

And that’s how Jacob found them.


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> an ounce of communication is worth a pound of cure.

Sara hadn’t anticipated the zero tolerance policy, given what she learned from Peter was the virtually unanimous use of scopolamine.

She bristled; they hadn't told her all the rules because they assumed she would follow them.

But the look in Faith’s eyes told her she had can-can-ed across several lines.

“Which verses were you studying?” she said coolly, and Sara’s light sheen of perspiration began to condense into larger drops. Or maybe that was the beer still drenching the back of her shirt.

_Ce bal est original_

_D'un galop infernal_

Sara’s voice wouldn’t come.

_Donnons tous le signal_

_Vive la galop infernal!_

Faith had a way of looming despite her stature. “It’s long past time to take this seriously, Sara.”

“We…we approached it with that intention entirely but-“

And suddenly her back was up against the wall, one hand gripping a fistful of hair and the other at her throat, Faith barely a quarter of an inch away. These folks were grabby.

“Remember that I chose you, Sara.” Faith’s hand slid down her sternum, down down down to the closure of her pants Sara had barely had the time to pull up, much less close before Jacob had hoisted her and Hannah up by the arms and marched them back out through the bar, the staff and patrons held at gunpoint, their eyes following them out the door. Alex shouting after them.

He threw her to the ground at Faith’s feet. John crouched down to pull her up by her hair (Sara grabbing onto his forearm to mitigate gravity), and with the other hand pinch her reddened lower lip between his thumb and the second knuckle of his index.

“What did I say about that mouth?”

Hannah was slumped in Jacob’s grip, her silence condemnation.

“Who’ll be telling Joseph?” he asked. It was clear it wouldn’t be him.

“Surely our dear Faith.” John said, pinching harder. Sara begged Faith with her eyes but her expression was closed.

And now she was back at the cabin, pinned, closer to Faith’s spectacular face than she had any right to be.

“Tomorrow, I will wake you early and we will pray until lunchtime and after lunch you will go to Joseph and you will repent.”

What does prayer look like in this new world? She supposes she's grateful they'll feed her. She wonders if she'll be able to stomach anything after this. She wants to laugh but there’s nothing funny about how much force Faith is exerting with one hand in her hair and the other pressing into her belly.

“And you will not make a fool out of me again.”

Faith doesn’t spend the night that night, and it’s enough space for Sara to give way to the anger that had been accumulating since it came to her attention that the hospitality extended to her was not the common protocol.

She doubted that a stern, close proximity talking-to and a slightly emptier bed to sleep on was the worst John and Jacob could come up with.

It made her sick to contemplate.

She resolved not to be there the following morning.

 

She didn’t get far at all.

“You ought to be with Father.” Faith says, Bliss coming off her like steam.

Sara didn’t anticipate the apparently extensive system of organization and oversight.

“Sara.”

How many times can these people say her goddamn name?

“You have to go, Sara, every second you stall it gets worse-“

“Maybe you could tell him I died?” Sara proposes.

“Careful.” John says. There's blood on his cuffs.

Nobody is glad to see him, he revels in it.

“The Father has very courteously requested that i escort you to what i assume is your funeral pyre.”

Off Sara’s muffled whine:

“John, let me take her-“

“If he wanted you to take her he would not have asked me.” He said, and shows Sara most all of his teeth.

Her stomach folds in on itself and quantum tunnels to a dimension where she isn’t in immense and imminent danger.

“Come on, rib.”

She can’t quite move yet, too busy looking pleadingly at Faith. John saunters over, fiendishly close, and puts his hand at the small of her back.

“Time is of the essence.”

“Be good, John.” Faith growls. He smiles.

“Certainly,” to Sara, “I know where being bad will get me.”

As soon as they were out of sight, his hand slid up her back and gripped the nape of her neck. He bent down close to her ear and said:

“This is way below my nonexistent pay grade, so you’d better make it worth my while.” which he punctuated by nipping at her earlobe. She jumped what felt like a mile high, but he was there again when she landed, crowding her into the car.

He kept his hand clamped down on her thigh the entire ride. She’d tried to dislodge it once and he brought it down hard with a flat palm before it clenched around her quadricep again like he was trying to make space between the muscle and the bone. The two heavies in the front seats made titillated eye contact.

She wants to ask about Alex but she suspects even saying his name is enough to put him in harm's way.

They were within sight of the compound, armed followers stationed at the entrance, protecting it or protecting themselves from it, she wondered hysterically.

Her feet were granite evidently and John was aggravated. He dragged her about 30 yards before stopping - and smiling. She didn’t think it was possible for one person to have so many bad feelings, but she had another bad feeling.

“I want a good look before he ruins it forever.”

Before she could even think to pull away, he’d crouched down, driven his shoulder into her stomach, grabbed her around the knees and lifted her off the ground. She drew her fist back to take a good shot at his kidney when he pulled down her pants with his somehow free hand and bit her. She yelped and tried to wriggle away, but he had a good mandible-ful and wasn’t letting go.

“Holy shit, stop. Oh my go-“ he bit down harder as she flailed, “Stop!!”

He did, she went limp, eyes watering in relief and rage as he ran his tongue over the impression he’d made.

“Mm. That’ll bruise nicely. Far be it from me to let Joseph have all the fun.”

“You fuck!” She sobbed, beating at his shoulders and ribcage as he sucked on the same damned section of her backside, “the fuck is wrong with-“ and just as suddenly he set her down at the entrance, grabbed the hem of her shirt and used it to wipe her snotty face, exposing her anterior too to all and sundry. Off her rattled expression:

“Can’t have you looking completely destroyed before you’ve _been_ completely destroyed.”

She has no witty rejoinder to that, and probably none to the next one, and opts instead to pull up her pants. He grabs her wrists, smiles with the mouth he was just chomping on her with.

“You might as well give them to me, rib. You won’t be wearing them long.”

She wanted to scream, but that might bring Joseph faster.

In this case, she did not wish to speak to the manager.

“That’ll do, John.” Joseph said, standing there since who knows when. “I’ve waited long enough, I think.”

Sara could have waited till the sun exploded but it did not appear that anyone gave a singular shit.


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Joseph is a Bad, Bad Man; Part 1

Pants finally up, Joseph leads her inside.

Where a solitary chair is waiting.

“I think this is a little disproportionate.” she says, trying to extract her wrist from his grip with marginal success.

“Already making your case? Perhaps I should have paired you with John instead.”

The pit that’s been in her stomach for what feels like the entirety of her conscious existence manages to widen further - allowing the boiling rage at its depths to see the light of day.

“I just wanted to see my friends, I don’t think that’s unreasonable.”

“Your friends do not appear to have a good influence on you, Sara.”

She wants to scream again, only louder. This sounds like the prologue to a greater, deeper, longer loneliness.

He didn’t know a damn thing, hadn’t seen the interior of their fucked-up home lives during that first year when they found one another, and how much refuge they (she) (they?) had found in doing so. Alex’s - a hitter and his silent, self-medicated wife, Hannah’s a civil war refugee turned mechanic and a legacy Marine who’d lost their mind in the Gulf, and Sara’s a rogues’ gallery of well-meaning saints she was too broken for and devils for whom she was not broken enough.

Which was he?

“My friends are the only reason I’ve lived this long.”

And she meant it. Sara could save the day in small ways (making sure everyone was fed, giving expert shoulder and scalp massages, being an superb listener, acting as a sympathetic representative when they interacted with cops-), but whenever they’d gotten into major trouble before, Alex had managed de-escalation, and if that failed, would join Hannah in combat. Sara was hopeless with a gun and they wouldn’t trust her with one anyway. She rarely swooped in and was able to save anybody, much less herself.

They’d found one of her notes before, before she’d meant for them to. She thought she’d never be made to feel sorrier in her life.

She wonders if today will prove her wrong.

“If this behavior persists, you will have to learn to live without them.”

No  
no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no

“I thought - I thought the idea was to save as many people as possible.”

“Yes, dearest. But the chaff _must and will_ be separated from the wheat.”

Please don’t compare my friends to crops, she thinks, recalling all the datura flowers she’d beheaded.

“Only a handful are worthy enough to belong to our family.”

How much is a handful in a tight fist?

Room enough for her, evidently.

She wasn’t ready to be that brand of special. Not by comparison.

“I was making progress with them-“

He rounds on her. “By what means, Sara? By sinning against your body? Against that which does not belong to you?”

This puts her back on her heels, on a bridge between ashamed and enraged.

“Even…even if it _wasn’t_ mine _which it is_ we didn’t - we didn’t get far-“

“A fine way to proselytize-“

“We’ve never-“

“I can assure you that you never will again. Not with them. Not like that.”

No matter his words his voice stays low and measured, making her feel like the unreasonable one. What are the words, what are the deeds that will bring the gentleness back into his eyes, that will spare her loves and still save her from solitude?

“You - you told me I wouldn’t be alone, you swore to me-“

“You are not alone, Sara, but you certainly will not be alone with those I do not approve of-”

“You’re not taking them away!” she can’t help but shout. The room reverberates with it. He jerks her in so close she has to alternate which of his eyes to look at.

“There will be no telling me what I will or won’t be doing-” she tugs back. He can certainly loom with the best of them but far be it from her to let this rest.

“You won’t take them away -“

“I do not believe that is for you to decide-“

“If you want my co-operation it is!”

His grip on her wrist is so tight. She’s never dared be this defiant before.

“I know what John and Jacob have done - I want you to promise they won’t be hurt anymore!”

He looks at her, his mouth frighteningly hard.

“That is a matter to be discussed after I have addressed your transgressions.” A thought to shit one’s pants for, but nevertheless:

“You have to promise.”

“Do you love them so dearly or do you love their potential to divert us from your own repentance?”

Her face goes hot at the thought that it could be both. He almost smiles.

“Surely they deserve no less than you.”

She doesn’t dare ask what she deserves, she’s sure he’ll elaborate.

“Promise me.” she tries to keep her intonation flat, without that upward inflection at the end that would betray her.

He cups her cheek with the hand not encircling her wrist and tips her face upwards. She can’t meet his eyes.

“ _‘I have forsaken my house, I have abandoned my heritage; I have given the beloved of my heart into the hands of her enemies.’_ ”

She didn’t know that particular verse but it sounded like he had made up his mind.

Her body decides that’s enough for today, and crumples up into a little ball.

“Up, dearest. You’ll weep more yet, I swear to you.”

She wouldn’t, so he hoisted her to her feet, frogmarching her over to the chair.

Which he then sat on and, despite her struggling, pulled her inexorably down and over his lap.

“Hey now-“

“Hay is for horses.” Joseph says flatly.

Are you fucking serious??? she thought as he transferred his grip on her wrists to one hand and used the other to draw down her drawers in the most hideous case of deja vu she’s ever experienced.

He’s so tall, her toes scrape at the floor.

He was generous and let her thrash about for a little while.

“Tell me - tell me about the optics of this,” she wheezes, “you raising your hand to strike a young lady.”

A rueful, incongruent chuckle as he rubs a slow circle in her lumbar spine. It’s a hard hand, a big, hard, calloused hand and everything in her body clenches accordingly.

“Even now, you prevaricate.” the hand drifts lower. “As it says, _‘he that loveth his child chasteneth her betimes diligently.’_ ”

It did not help his case to be conjugating his verbs like Shakespeare. And it didn’t help hers to be draped over his thighs like a caftan.

So she indulged in more struggling. Hannah had taught her a few holds, and how to get out of them (if she wanted to, sometimes Sara let her hang on for longer than was necessary), but this one had not been part of the curriculum.

She cranes back to look him in the face, just to be sure that this was the same man who’d sat across from her and pulled at her heart with tales of his suffering at the hands of others.

“Does he that loveth his child do anything else diligently betimes? Like-“

“Sara.”

“-bring her nearest and dearest to a medical practitioner for fluids and stitches and perhaps skin grafts, just as an example?”

“I will remind you-“

“Could Peter do it?”

“-that you are here to atone for your actions-“

“I’m sure he could do it-“

“-not negotiate the atonement of anyone else.“

“What good are they to anybody if they’re dead?” she asks, trying to sound rational as her eyes begin to leak.

The hand stills for a moment, but only a moment, before his fingers begin tracing the impression of John’s teeth marks. Reminding her of yet another person she wanted to suffer in eternal torment.

“Whatever I decide to do with them is not a matter for debate or comment, you will abide by it regardless.”

She wonders if she can kick her leg up far enough to knock him in the temple with her heel.

She tries, he catches the back of her thigh and squeezes harder than John ever dared attempt on the car ride over.

“I understand, Sara, I understand the doubt that grips your heart,” she doubted that highly, it wasn’t his friends who were being tortured and slowly starved to death, “that imagined instability that has you running for whatever shelter you can find, worrying so much about the needs of others that you’d sooner push them away than let them down.”

His hold tightens, she’s losing feeling in her fingers.

“But I will not let you push me, Sara, away or at all.”

She bit down on a whine.

“The only one whose needs we must concern ourselves with are the Lord’s.”

The whine escaped.

“And what the Lord needs is for us to have a conversation.”

In this configuration??? she thought frantically.

She wondered what he would do if she simply slithered off his lap. The way he then gripped her side implied a little more telepathy than she was prepared for.

“You know corporal punishment is largely frowned upon nowadays.” she said weakly, trying to twist her wrists free.

He readjusts his grip - takes off his ring, her heart is blocking her airway.

“A great many people frown down on what we’ve built here at Eden’s Gate, it does not hinder our progress, and it will not shield them from The Collapse.”

He strokes her back, “But still I must do whatever I can to protect my family.”

“ _Ohhhhh_ man, Sara,” Alex’s voice says, “if this is where the buck stops then you’re fuckin _in_ for it.”

“Flex,” Hannah’s says, “make his life difficult.”

She wonders if her head is the last place she’ll hear their voices.

The thought is unbearable.

“I have a family,“ she chokes out, “and they would never-“

And then his hand comes down and renders her momentarily voiceless. That ends soon enough when that same hand squeezes that very same surface area and she can’t help but emit a whimper.

“You do, Sara,” he strikes her again, leaving it where it’s landed as if meaning to trap the vibrations between - “and given your disobedience of late they most certainly will.”

She imprisons a cry with her teeth, she can barely exist in a reality where all this is happening, much less imagine one where it could happen again.

“You can’t do this-“

He does.


	7. Chapter 7

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Joseph is a Bad, Bad Man; Part 2

“How am I to interpret your behavior, Sara?”

How should I interpret _yours_??? she wants to shout but the strength and speed with which he-

“How am I meant to react, given word that you’ve been found-“

-suggested he could go even harder.

“intoxicated-“

“I barely had a si-“

“mid- _ravishment_ -“

More like 1/16th of the way if she knew Hannah and Alex. She almost laughed but then there was his hand to consider.

“and worst of all, perjured.”

Ooooooooooof now there was a word. And a hand.

“Fuck!”

Another one comes in quick succession, only harder.

“ _Fuck!_ ”

“Sara.” he growls.

Those had come from her?

“To what can I attribute this? Should I take your actions as an indictment of _me_ \- of your friends?

Holy shit that stung

“Or of you?”

Hadn’t they been at this long enough already??

“It’s me. It was all me - Ah!“

“Do not add guile to your offenses, Sara. The Lord sees your designs and bids me correct them-“

Nothing correct to see over here, kids

“-so that you may be saved from Sheol on Judgement Day.”

And that was always the sucker punch wasn’t it? That opting into survival required something to survive, that this newness that was promised necessitated the death of something older and easier to rely on.

She didn’t know which of her thoughts emerged and which remained internal, all she could really hear was the metronome of - she wanted to protest that she hadn’t signed anything, that this wasn’t how arbitration worked, that she needed to know Hannah and Alex would be saved too.

“It was not by accident that _you_ were chosen, Sara-”

She feels like a strobe light, going dark between flashes of his voice and his hand

“We have seen and continue to see the future in you,”

colliding and

“longed-for-“

colliding and

“-but certain.”

colliding.

“However, dearest-“

She tried to buck out from his grasp between blows but they somehow only managed to come harder.

“-the victory will be as hard-won as you choose to make it-”

Then what on earth or in heaven did defeat look like?

“-and I do not know that Alex and Hannah will be sharing that future with you.”

And then he stops.

Something comes loose inside her, like how they say the hearts of people in plane crashes do - their bodies found outwardly intact, their insides full of blood.

She wept in earnest now, her shoulders heaving, a line of snot connecting her nose to the rug. He was rubbing her back with the very same hand he had just brutalized her with and it didn’t have the good grace to fall right off his wrist.

As usual his convictions were fierce and fully supported by The Good Book.

“ _‘Thus says the Lord: If you turn back, I will take you back, and you shall stand before me.’_ ”

She can’t even imagine standing, she wonders if she’ll be able to again after this.

She certainly won’t be able to sit.

“ _‘If you utter what is precious, and not what is worthless, you shall serve as my mouth.’_ ”

She didn’t know if she could handle that responsibility. His mouth was much more coherent than hers at the moment, strangled sobs avalanching out of it.

“ _‘They will fight against you, but they shall not prevail over you, for I will deliver you out of the hand of the wicked, and redeem you from the grasp of the ruthless.’_ ”

Who will deliver her from the wicked hand and the ruthless grasp she had just been subjected to and indeed might be again?

“You-“ she sobs, “you said they would be safe-“

HIs hand his hand his hand

“You said we would be safe-“

He folds his torso over her, his breath striking the back of her neck.

“ _‘The heart is devious above all else; it is perverse—who can understand it?’_ ”

And starts back up again.

Ho  
ly  
Shit

She wishes he would hit her in the head so she wouldn’t have to be conscious for this; his betrayal, her pain, the percussion instrument he’s made out of her backside.

“ _‘I the Lord test the mind and search the heart, to give to all according to their ways, according to the fruit of their doings.’_ ”

She can’t think about fruit, she’s sure her ass has gone from Pink Lady to Washington Red.

“ _‘I will pursue you will goodness and mercy.’_ ”

A laugh erupts from her. When? Inquiring minds want to know.

“I told you I would not abandon you.”

She feels like she’s plummeting through the air, praying for the impact of the ground to end it all.

Screaming the whole way.

Sara was by no means a stoic but her tears were always steam coming off the ancient, roiling pool of grief inside, inoffensive in their brevity if not in their intensity.

Now it felt like he meant to empty her out.

“It’s almost over now, my dearest.”

Why ‘almost’? Why not ‘this instant’?? Why hadn’t it ended a millennia ago??? Did he honestly believe that it would be over after this, that she would forgive him? For Hannah? For Alex? For believing that she had done something that merited this?

Could she forgive herself for believing it too?

His hand comes down once more and stays there. She hopes the heat coming off of her rear scalds him. If it does he shows no sign.

All she can hear now is the sound of both of them breathing.

“Did you get what you wanted to out of that?” her voice wavers.

His sigh was softer than his grip. The other hand glided over her backside (like a cast iron pan fresh from the fire) and gave one likely scarlet buttock a firm squeeze in a manner that didn’t seem strictly punitive.

“Do you require my administrations _further_ , dearest?”

He can undoubtedly see and feel her clench.

She told herself the hardness digging into her belly was the massive prize-winning belt buckle he portered about.

“What else is massive and prize-winning?” Alex says, unbidden, with his waggly-eyebrows voice that always made Sara want to burn them off.

“Shut it.” she accidentally says out loud.

Joseph utters a soft laugh.

“Is that a yes?”

HIs hand drifts to her tailbone

Then further down.

She felt like a vagus nerve without a body, the ping-ponging feedback loop of “oh no” and “oh yes” making her blood pressure spike and her face go hot.

“Oh, _Sara_.” he said softly, letting go of her wrists to investigate with both hands.

It hadn’t even occurred to her that such a thing could make her wet, and that even if such a thing could that no one else would live to possess that information.

What had they done to her?

His finger was-

What had she done to herself?

circling her-

He couldn’t manage all her limbs at once and she tumbled off his lap and onto the floor

They looked at one another in complete silence

He cleared his throat.

“There will be expectations of you, Sara. I will ask Sister Faith to acquaint you with them.”

Oh.

God.

Damn.


End file.
